The present invention relates to the photoelectric field and, more particularly, to a sintering method and a display device packaging method using the sintering method.
Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) devices have received wide attention from the science society and the industries in recent years. OLED displays have entered the lives of people, but their short service life is still a problem. Conventional OLED devices generally use a high work function metal as the anode and use a low work function metal as the cathode. Since low work function metal is apt to oxide, particularly harsh sealing of devices is critical. Ultraviolet (UV) packaging and frit packaging are two of the most commonly used packaging methods. The water vapor permeability of UV packaging is about 10−4 g/m3/day, whereas the water vapor permeability of frit packaging is about 10−6/m3/day. Thus, frit packaging is the idealist packaging method in the industrialized production. However, frit packaging can only be used to sinter a rectangular structure due to the sintering path during the frit packaging process. FIG. 1 shows a conventional frit sintering path, wherein the beam enters from a side of the rectangle and starts from the ON position in the drawing to proceed with sintering in the direction indicated by the arrow. The energy has an accelerating distance in the beginning. After acceleration, the energy beam sinters along the rectangle. Next, the energy used for sintering gradually decreases to zero at a location near the accelerating position and ends at the OFF position, finishing the sintering along the pattern shown. The sintering path can only be rectangular in such a sintering process. Namely, sintering of other shapes is impossible.
Since the products produced by the conventional frit packaging can only have a rectangular structure, development of products of other shapes has great advantages to people pursuing personality and fashion, which is particularly important in wearable products with a circular shape, an elliptic shape, or any other shape according to the product needs.